A Bouquet of Memories
by Harper64
Summary: Foyle returns home one evening and considers his life. A on-off short 'scene'.


**Author's note**: A one-off experimental piece in both style and content, so do please let me know what you think; good bad, indifferent – I'll take them all.

Many thanks to GiuliettaC who made 'L'Aimant' Rosalind's own, the quote is from 'Daisy' by Francis Thompson.

We all know who 'he' is but feel free to supply your own 'she'.

oooooOOOOOooooo

**A Bouquet of Memories**

He opens the front door and inhales deeply, appreciating the subtle combination of aromas that identify this house as his home. He'd always had an exceptional sense of smell, or so he was led to believe by others who couldn't detect odours that he could. When he was a child he could have told you exactly which room of whose house he was in just by the mixture of scents there.

The house of his grandparents, on his mother's side, was a mix of carbolic soap and beeswax. A staunch Methodist, his grandmother had made housework a religion too.

His other grandparents' house smelled of the sea; canvas, oil, and the faintest whiff of salted fish. His paternal grandfather had been a fisherman, retired early because of injury. He now worked in a factory but could not leave the sea behind.

The impression of his own home, this very house, at that young age was the 'Brasso' that his father used to polish the buttons on his uniform, and the delicious smell of the stockpot that always seemed to be simmering on the back of the range.

His parents gone, the house had become his and when he married and had a son the whole atmosphere of the house had changed. Entering the hallway the first thing he noticed, then, was the scent of leather; his briefcase abandoned under the stairs, his son's satchel, boots and football. Upstairs his son's room had a musty whiff of sweaty socks whilst his wife's perfume, 'L'Aimant' permeated their bedroom and crept along the landing into the bathroom.

For months after her death his daily routine included opening her wardrobe and burying his face in her clothing, the floral bouquet helping him imagine, even if for a split-second, that she was still with him. He did this less as time went on, only feeling the need when things were particularly difficult. He vividly remembered the day when he had opened the door to find only cedar-wood and dust in his nostrils. He had sat on the bed and wept until exhausted, slept in his clothes and awoken with a feeling of misery and despair. Gradually he had clawed his way out of the pit of depression and slowly, oh so slowly, had begun to let go of the scentless clothes; relegated them to a chest of drawers on the attic floor.

His son, bright and doing well at school, had brought home a volume of 'Modern British Poetry'. He had picked it up one evening and flicked through it. His eye had been drawn to a poem by Francis Thompson; he read

"The fairest things have fleetest end,

Their scent survives their end."

His wife had been his 'fair Rosalind' of Shakespeare's Forest of Arden; he was undone. His son, not understanding what had been read or felt, had been unprepared for the outpouring of emotion that a simple couplet had brought about. Embarrassed and more than a little frightened of his father in such a state he had withdrawn into himself. It had taken months to rebuild his trust.

Now he stands in the hallway and attempts to distinguish the individual scents of his new life.

There is the soap, not carbolic now, but the soap flakes used for the daily laundry of nappies; and here the oil, not pungent diesel but a lighter sweeter smell; the oil used by his wife on her sewing machine. That cooking smell is not the ever-present stockpot but his child's vegetables left to cook longer in order to be mashed up for a little mouth. Added to these is the sweet smell of baby powder, with the faintest trace, undetectable by anyone else, of regurgitated milk, strangely not unpleasant. And the perfume, no longer 'L'Aimant' but the woodier, earthier fragrance of 'Soir de Paris'; although saved for very special occasions, he knows that _it_ now permeates their bedroom; he will catch a trace of it on the pillowcase, a breath of it when she opens the wardrobe.

His whole life is encapsulated in the distinctive smell of this house. He closes the door, his shoulders relax and he follows another very faint aroma. It leads him to the living room where she sits waiting for him; hand cream, necessary after all that washing, fresh sweat and desire. She rises to greet him. He is home.


End file.
